Seven search-and-rescue dogs in Taiwan are UN-certified, the National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue Team said yesterday as it took part in an annual drill held to mark National Disaster Prevention Day.
Taiwan has about 30 search-and-rescue dogs, spread across eight units, dog handler Chou Tsung-chi (周聰吉) said.
Of nine UN-certified search-and-rescue dogs in Asia, seven are in Taiwan and two are in Japan, he said, adding that it means they can be sent on humanitarian missions by the UN.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
As the seven dogs have only recently been certified, they have not yet taken part in international rescue missions, Chou said.
Taiwan began training search-and-rescue dogs after the 921 Earthquake on Sept. 21, 1999, when dogs from abroad joined the rescue efforts and helped locate many people, Chou said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) observed the drill and held one of the certified dogs on the team — a six-year-old Jack Russell terrier nicknamed Le Le (樂樂) — in her arms for a group photograph.
Le Le is responsible for performing search-and-rescue work in tight spaces, Chou said.
When buildings collapse during earthquakes, rescues rely on small dogs like Le Le that can enter through tiny gaps in buildings to search for survivors and victims, he said.
Le Le is the first Jack Russell to be trained into a search-and-rescue dog in Taiwan, the agency said, adding that it has also trained labrador retrievers, among other breeds.
Tsai told attendants that she would task the Executive Yuan with mapping the areas of disaster prevention that could be more precise and faster.
When faced with earthquakes, storms or floods, national agencies and local governments must apply the same standard operating procedures, update one another, divide tasks appropriately and cooperate, she said, adding that she would assess the improvements to the system on next year’s National Disaster Prevention Day.
Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of the 921 Earthquake, which took the lives of 2,456 people.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching